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Labor economist and others have a long tradition of trying to establish causal links between features of the classroom environment and children's learning, an area

Labor economist and others have a long tradition of trying to establish causal links between features of the classroom environment and children's learning, an area of investigation that we call "education production." This terminology reflects the fact that we think of features of the school environment as inputs that cost money, while the output that schools produce is student learning. A key question in research on education production is which inputs produce the most learning given their costs. One of the most expensive inputs is class size, since smaller classes can only be achieved by hiring more teachers. It is therefore important to know whether the expense of smaller classes has a payoff in terms of higher student achievement.

A randomized study, the Tennessee STAR experiment, was designed to estimate the effects of smaller classes in primary school. It cost about $12 million and was implemented for a cohort of kindergarteners in 1985-1986. The study ran for four years, until the original cohort of kindergartners was in third grade and involved about 11,600 children. The average class size in regular Tennessee classes in 1985-1986 was about 22.3. The experiment assigned students to one of two treatments: small classes with 13-17 children and regular classes with 22-25 children.

  1. How do you plan to use the STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes assuming test score is your outcome? Please explain why the Tennessee STAR experiment can be used to estimate the effects of smaller classes without bias.

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